All This And No Caffeine
Oh my sweetums, something has come over me. Once upon a time, like last week, I was totally disorganized. Disorganized as in scattered, running around like the proverbial chicken sans head.
Like these folks.
Sigh of relief. You didn’t think I’d show a dead chicken video, did you?
The point is, I was running around flapping my wings and squawking (yes, squawking) about doing S.T.U.F.F when in reality very little stuff was getting done. Except the squawking. I’m good at that.
And then Alyson Stanfield, the Art Biz Coach and author of I’d Rather Be in the Studio, began having her way with my bad habits via her ecourse Organize Your Art Biz.
BTW, it’s a great book and no one’s paying me to say that. Buy it.
Back to being somewhat organized…I now have a office separate from my studio. And a clean inbox. And files, both electronic and paper that are shaping up and starting to make sense. Best of all I have discovered the elephant in the room…Evernote. And I am in luvvvvvvvv.
I will not go into all the details of Evernote here. Let’s just say it involves NOTEBOOKS! OMG, do you know how much I love notebooks? And those legal pads? I bet there are at least four on the kitchen table right now. But my EN notebooks are free from coffee rings and kitty puke because they only exist in cyberland. You can have as many as you want, give them each their own names, group them in related stacks and fill them with things you clip from the internet. Or notes you write. Grocery lists. Everything syncs between desktop, cloud and mobile. So if you’re out and about and want to save someone’s business card but don’t want to clutter up your wallet, take a photo with your phone and file it instantly in the right notebook in Evernote. And you can have Evernote send you reminders when something is due. So far my art ‘stack’ has notebooks for expenses, inspiration, artists to follow, ideas for classes, reference photos and submission deadlines. The notes within these notebooks had previously been all over my desktop and archived in email. Which means they were all but inaccessible. Forgotten.
Especially submission deadlines. I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve missed because the call to artists disappeared somewhere in the belly of the beastly laptop.
But not any more!
One of my newfound notes was a call to artists for large scale figurative paintings. Bingo! Some of those Women in Red that I did back in January on the iPad have been begging to live large on canvas. Well, now they will.
Which brings us to today’s work-in-progress. Ta-da… It’s a big puppy, 4×4 feet. This is early days, just blocking out the shapes.
I started with a canvas that already had some preliminary layers. I sketched out the figures with charcoal.
Then added the first of the color. Acrylic. Got a long ways to go but it’s a start.
Love to hear your thoughts on this. Have any great apps or productivity tips you want to share? Let’s get a discussion going in the comments below.
Meanwhile, remember this:
It’s turning into my new signoff, like Roy and Dale’s Happy Trails.
